Pack up your hoodie and skateboard – Avril Lavigne is growing up. The snotty pop-rock brat has decided to become a snotty acoustic balladeer, releasing an album of unplugged material.

"The songs are mainly the acoustic [guitar] and my vocal," Lavigne told Billboard. Though the singer has done the angsty acoustic thing on previous albums, it's usually bookended by deafening rock choruses and swathes of sappy strings. "[The new record] is a lot different from anything I've done before. It's not a pop-rock record. This is more about emotion and feeling."

This "emotion and feeling" approach started when Lavigne was asked to write a tune for her brand of perfume. Black Star was the result, and the jingle – sorry, er, the song – is the new album's centrepiece. It's also, conveniently, the name of the perfume.

Though she is again working with songwriters Evan Taubenfield and Butch Walker, Lavigne has sole writing credit on four of the eight songs recorded so far. But lest you suspect that Lavigne is maturing as a songwriter, rest assured – these songs were written years ago, when Lavigne was a teenager.

"I always had material, but some people that I worked with didn't really care, because they wanted to write the stuff," Lavigne said. "Some people were just like, 'Ah, whatever. You're a little girl. What do you know?' [Now] I know how this works. It's my fourth record. It's not rocket science. I think people doubted me before, and I'm finally just like, 'I'm doing this.'"

Darlin', for instance, was written when Lavigne was just 15 years old. "It was probably the second song I [ever] wrote; I was trying to figure it all out," she said. Another, Everybody Hurts, explains that "it's OK to be afraid". REM, we suspect, will be making some calls.

The album is being produced by Lavigne's husband, Deryck Whibley, who sings in Sum 41. "I started this record off really slow, just writing songs at home on my piano," Lavigne explained. "I'm kind of just keeping it in the family."

The as-yet untitled record will be released 17 November. Lavigne hopes to promote it with a theatre tour. "I just wanna have silence around me," she told Entertainment Weekly. What more could you ask for at an Avril Lavigne gig?